Panic in Year 2003

Rating: Null/10 (28 June 2003)

In 1962 Ray Milland directed himself in a taut little B-movie thriller called "Panic in Year Zero" which in it's own unpretentious way examined the theme of "We're on our own so now what the hell do we do" more compellingly than other flicks with much bigger budgets. A key moment was when the Milland character heard someone say that there was no more law so they could do what they wanted; he sharply responded "The law will come back. We just have to survive until it does." I don't know if Danny Boyle has seen this movie but I see a lot of it in "28 Days Later," especially the underlying faith of the characters that (A) there will always be some form of government and (B) this is a good thing. I also see this very much as a movie by and about British people, so it's interesting to read how many viewers on this site discern in it lessons for America.
I've only seen two of Mr. Boyle's previous films, "Trainspotting" and "A Life Less Ordinary," and parts of a third, "The Beach," on TV. He's always got his tongue at least somewhat in his cheek, and he doesn't mind mixing the funny with the horrible, letting audience members react as they will. John Cleese once remarked to Dick Cavett that Americans would benefit if they could learn the European knack of holding conflicting views simultaneously. Mr. Boyle also seems to be teaching this lesson. At times he seems to be daring us to break out of our standard cinematic emotional responses. But when he wants to, he can capture a moment of genuine pathos and present it as deftly as anyone working today. An example in "28 Days Later" is when the hero looks at the photo left behind by his dead parents and reads what's written on the back of it.
Mr. Boyle seems keen on asking WHY humans do what they do. He would seem to agree with Thomas Carlyle's observation about the average man that "Mere use-and-wont leads him everywhere by the nose, and prejudice, which he pretends to despise, is his absolute lawgiver." In each movie he'll put his characters in some bizarre milieu, whether it's sub-Third-World conditions of Scottish heroin addiction in "Trainspotting," or people hounded by murderous angels in "A Life Less Ordinary," or an island run by a fascistic drug cult in "The Beach," or a depopulated England beset with diseased maniacs in "28 Days Later." Each of these is basically a backdrop against which Mr. Boyle examines human habits and tendencies. "28" zeroes in on the English specifically with their "insular" mentality. Maybe Mr. Boyle was inspired by the "mad cow disease" scare over there, and he seems to be poking fun at the country's obsession with keeping rabies at bay. The mysterious disease in the movie resembles rabies in some respects. We hear characters speculating what's happening in the rest of the world---"Everywhere else people are still watching television. What should they do with a sick little island? Quarantine it, that's what." Living on a tiny island that once dominated much of the world, the English have always had a kind of love/hate relationship with that world. Most recently it's heard in debate about the "Euro" currency. Mr. Boyle also spoofs the English preoccupation with social delicacies, as when the army officer tells his guests/captives "Look, I promised them women, you see." Then he shows us the two female characters dressed to the nines sitting on a couch in front of a portrait of the grand dame of the house in days of yore, also dressed to the nines.
Anyone who started reading this wondering what I think of the movie's visceral aspects has probably left already, so now I'll address the visceral aspects: a lot of it's well done, although some scenes feel rushed. The spookiest scene is probably the one in the tunnel with the flat tire and the rats and the approaching shadows on the wall, even though the screenwriter had to bend over backwards to put the characters there. Much of the action is dark and/or chaotically edited, hard to tell who's doing what to whom, but that seems to be the style nowadays so I'll just have to live with it. (We've all had scary dreams, right? Think of one you've had, say with someone or something coming after you: did it have eye-blink editing? Wasn't it just an unbroken, inescapable view of the menace? That's what made it scary, right? Why can't movies do that?) By the way everyone refers to the sick people as "zombies," but as I recall, they weren't the re-animated dead, they were just very sick live people. A disease communicated mostly by blood or saliva ought to have been relatively easy to contain, I would have thought, as opposed to one that's airborne or carried by bugs of some kind. My mom, who saw it with me, pointed out that it would have been scarier if the disease hadn't manifested itself immediately after infection but rather taken a while, so someone could seem healthy then eventually deteriorate. Since the countryside seemed relatively free of the sick, what was so urgent about getting to Manchester? That recorded broadcast seemed a pretty obvious setup, along with various plot contrivances pointed out by others. Still, I'm cutting it a lot of slack just 'cause I couldn't predict every plot point an hour ahead of time, and based on Mr. Boyle's track record in that regard I'll happily pay to see his next offering in the cinema so long as it doesn't have Leo Di Caprio in it.
At the outset, with the Animal Liberation Front types raiding the research lab, I was hoping that whole disgusting can of worms would get examined in a relatively major movie, but unfortunately it was just a set-up sequence; the chimps are never seen again. I guess it's just a given today that animal abuse is okay if we're allegedly trying to cure something; never mind that the chief goal of this industry, like any industry, is self-perpetuation. It's too bad Mr. Boyle didn't use the original ending mentioned in IMDB, with the human discussing procreation with the chicken, to tie in with the animal theme. Guess he too has to worry about audience unhappiness with unhappy endings. To borrow a line from Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut": Mr. Boyle, "Hollywood waits at the end of the rainbow...."

Don't English people have any guns in their houses? Or beer?